Channeling Their Inner Cavaliers, Indians Push the Red Sox to the Brink

CLEVELAND — The most popular man in all of northeast Ohio strode onto the grass at Progressive Field on Friday wearing a red Indians cap and a navy jersey. He had come to spread some of his talismanic powers.

“We’re here for these guys over here,” said LeBron James, flanked by some of his Cleveland Cavaliers teammates and pointing toward the Cleveland Indians’ dugout.

This is the first baseball postseason here since the Cavaliers extinguished the city’s 52-year major championship drought in June, a triumph that funneled optimism — or, at least, not pessimism — to the millions of Cleveland fans more familiar with despair.

All of that transformation was on display on Friday at the corner of Ontario Street and Carnegie Avenue, where the Indians shoved the Boston Red Sox to the brink of elimination in their best-of-five division series.

Absorbing James’s positive vibes, the Indians jolted Boston with four second-inning runs, then cruised behind the pitching of their ace, Corey Kluber, to a 6-0 victory in Game 2, less than 24 hours after they captured Game 1 by a 5-4 score.

Lonnie Chisenhall launched a three-run homer to pace Cleveland, which can advance to its first American League Championship Series since 2007 if it captures Game 3 on Sunday at Fenway Park.

Yes, the good people here, haunted by the Drive and the Fumble and the Shot, know better than to assume anything. But during the first two games of this series, they have watched the Indians assert their superiority in all facets as Boston’s starting pitching disintegrated, with 10 runs allowed in just seven and two-thirds innings.

The culprit Friday was David Price, who, at his introductory news conference in Boston last December, quipped that he was saving all of his playoff victories for the Red Sox. But after allowing five runs in three and a third innings Friday, Price is 0-8 in nine postseason starts with a 5.74 E.R.A.

A record that awful usually belongs to the downtrodden Cleveland Browns, whose quest for their first victory this season will be challenged Sunday by another beloved team of New England, the Patriots, who arrive here just as the Red Sox depart.

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The Cleveland Cavaliers’ LeBron James, accompanied by some of his teammates, speaking to Indians fans at Progressive Field before Game 2. “We’re here for these guys over here,” James said, pointing to the Indians’ dugout.CreditPaul Sancya/Associated Press

It will make for a remarkable two-sport Sunday doubleheader between these two cities, and the plot lines are extensive.

Indians Manager Terry Francona, who steered the Red Sox to two World Series titles, returns to Boston for the first time in a postseason setting. Meanwhile, Patriots Coach Bill Belichick visits the town where his head-coaching career began and — sorry to say, Browns fans — is also bringing along the fresh-out-of-exile Tom Brady.

It is just the Browns’ luck that they drew New England in Week 5 for Brady’s return from the four-game suspension he received for his role in a scheme to deflate footballs. His tour of vengeance swings through FirstEnergy Stadium at 1 p.m. Sunday, three hours before the Red Sox and the Indians get back at it in Boston.

In the backdrop of all this is the fact that the Red Sox and the Patriots, combined, have won seven titles since 2002 and that the Indians and the Browns have, of course, won none. And the Browns, unlike the Indians, are just not very good.

“As much as I don’t want to, I’ll watch, and I’ll be upset,” said Donny Maddron, 32, of Brooklyn, Ohio, of the football game. He wore a red T-shirt that read “I love CLE,” with a baseball replacing the usual heart symbol. “Who knows? Tom Brady can be really rusty.” Then he paused. “But let’s be honest. I’m just trying to convince myself.”

The Indians, on the other hand, have already convinced him and all of the other Indians fans that they might be up to something. Their series-opening victory Thursday was their first in the playoffs since 2007, when they blew a three-games-to-one lead in the A.L.C.S. to Boston, whose teams have a knack for inflicting misery here.

In James’s first tour as a Cavalier, the Celtics twice ousted him from the playoffs in the conference semifinals. And even if the Indians did beat a team from Boston to win their last World Series — the Braves, back in 1948 — their fans tend to remember the more recent, and cumulative, anguish.

There were the six no-hit relief innings thrown by Boston’s ailing Pedro Martinez in 1999 that knocked the Indians out of the postseason, and Joel Skinner’s costly seventh-inning decision to hold up Kenny Lofton at third base in Game 7 of the 2007 A.L.C.S.

All of it still torments fans like Steve Weakland, 49, of Brunswick, Ohio. Speaking of his city’s various failures against Boston, Weakland lamented: “We never seem to come out on top. We might have at some point, but I couldn’t tell you when.”

Actually, in addition to 1948’s triumph, the Indians ousted the Red Sox from the postseason in 1995 and 1998. But that sort of gets lost in the negativity that has long pervaded Cleveland — “catastrophic thinking,” Weakland called it — and only started to wane when the Cavaliers stunned the favored Golden State Warriors by overcoming a three-games-to-one deficit four months ago.

One of those three victories, in Game 6, came at Quicken Loans Arena, which sits just across a plaza from Progressive Field.

Sure enough, the next night, the Indians defeated the White Sox on a Carlos Santana homer in the bottom of the ninth, kindling a 14-game winning streak and a sense among Indians players that they could pick up on the Cavaliers’ momentum.

“There was all this excitement and energy, and it just transferred over here,” said Cody Allen, the Indians’ closer.

Or as his teammate, first baseman Mike Napoli, said of Cleveland after Friday’s victory: “The city’s hungry.”

“I felt like we all thought it was our turn this year,” said another Indian, second baseman Jason Kipnis.

Still, it is worth remembering that the Indians have not won a title of their own in 68 years, the longest drought in the A.L. It resonates for Francona, whose father, Tito, played for Cleveland from 1959 to 1964.

“It’s not my fault my dad didn’t win,” Francona said. “This is hard enough to win when you’re playing good teams. But to go back 50, 60, 70 years, it’s not fair to anybody.”

Francona’s deft manipulation of the bullpen helped the Indians prevail in Game 1, and his faith in Chisenhall helped them build an insurmountable lead in Game 2. Before stepping to the plate in the second inning with Cleveland leading, 1-0, Chisenhall had batted 47 times this season against a left-handed pitcher without hitting a home run.

On a 2-1 fastball from Price, Chisenhall unloaded. The ball rocketed over the right-field fence on a line, caroming onto the playing surface so quickly — on the TBS telecast, Ernie Johnson speculated the ball deflected off a camera’s Plexiglas cover — that Boston right fielder Mookie Betts did not even realize it was a home run.

That four-run advantage buoyed Kluber, who muffled the highest-scoring team in baseball.

The Red Sox went through assorted pitchers after Price departed, and during a sixth-inning pitching change, the giant video screen flashed James and some of his Cavaliers teammates in a luxury suite. They were decked out in Indians gear and reveling in the Indians’ good fortune.

One championship down, one more maybe starting to take shape. These days, Cleveland is entitled to dream.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Indians Channel Their Inner Cavaliers. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe